Article

Virgil: objects on the head of a pin

Author:

Ben L. TitzerAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications

Pages 191 - 208

https://doi.org/10.1145/1167473.1167489

Published: 16 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Embedded microcontrollers are becoming increasingly prolific, serving as the primary or auxiliary processor in products and research systems from microwaves to sensor networks. Microcontrollers represent perhaps the most severely resource-constrained embedded processors, often with as little as a few bytes of memory and a few kilobytes of code space. Language and compiler technology has so far been unable to bring the benefits of modern object-oriented languages to such processors. In this paper, I will present the design and implementation of Virgil, a lightweight object-oriented language designed with careful consideration for resource-limited domains. Virgil explicitly separates initialization time from runtime, allowing an application to build complex data structures during compilation and then run directly on the bare hardware without a virtual machine or any language runtime. This separation allows the entire program heap to be available at compile time and enables three new data-sensitive optimizations: reachable members analysis, reference compression, and ROM-ization. Experi-mental results demonstrate that Virgil is well suited for writing microcontroller programs, with five demonstrative applications fitting in less than 256 bytes of RAM with fewer than 50 bytes of metadata. Further results show that the optimizations presented in this paper reduced code size between 20% and 80% and RAM size by as much as 75%.

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Index Terms

Virgil: objects on the head of a pin
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Dynamic compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Classes and objects
        Inheritance
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications

October 2006

514 pages

ISBN:1595933484

DOI:10.1145/1167473

General Chair:
Peri Tarr
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA
,
Program Chairs:
William R. Cook
University of Texas at Austin, USA
,
Robert Biddle
Carleton University, Canada
,
Richard P. Gabriel
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 41, Issue 10
Proceedings of the 2006 OOPSLA Conference
October 2006
480 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1167515
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 16 October 2006

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OOPSLA06: ACM SIGPLAN Object Oriented Programming Systems and Applications Conference

October 22 - 26, 2006

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3528223.3530116
Chandran PCiccone LGross MBradley D(2022)Local anatomically-constrained facial performance retargetingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3528223.353011441:4(1-14)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3528223.3530114
Zhang ZGe ZWei YCheng XXie GLiu G(2022)1S-1R arrayMicroelectronic Engineering10.1016/j.mee.2021.111697254:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.mee.2021.111697
Raveendran SChandrasekhar A(2022)Inspecting and classifying physical failures in MEMS substrates during fabrication using computer visionMicroelectronic Engineering10.1016/j.mee.2021.111696254:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.mee.2021.111696
Fiedler BEntrup GDietrich CLohmann D(2021)ARA: Static Initialization of Dynamically-Created System Objects2021 IEEE 27th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00039(400-412)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00039
Sharif HSrivastava PHuzaifa MKotsifakou MJoshi KSarita YZhao NAdve VMisailovic SAdve S(2019)ApproxHPVM: a portable compiler IR for accuracy-aware optimizationsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33606123:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
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Wimmer CStancu CHofer PJovanovic VWögerer PKessler PPliss OWürthinger T(2019)Initialize once, start fast: application initialization at build timeProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33606103:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
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Pilipenko APliss OTilevich EMössenböck H(2018)Redundancy elimination in the presence of split class initializationProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes10.1145/3237009.3237014(1-14)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2018
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